10 films that influenced Star Wars

Was Humphrey Bogart the original Han Solo? Is Chewbacca the Cowardly Lion? And where did Leia's hair appear first? Tim Robey on the films that inspired George Lucas's space saga

1. Flash Gordon (1936)

George Lucas’s first inkling wasn’t a world of his own devising, but a remake. Alex Raymond’s comic-strip hero first appeared in print in 1934, and within a couple of years had been filmed as a serial, starring the Olympic swimming champion Buster Crabbe (who also played Buck Rogers). Lucas couldn’t get the rights, and so the project transmogrified into Star Wars. Add a dose of the writer and theorist Joseph Campbell (especially his 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand Faces) and a new modern myth was created, but many elements of the Flash Gordon serials remained: Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back, soft wipes between scenes, the conflict between rebels and imperial forces, manta-ray-shaped craft, and even the legendary title crawl. Lucas has acknowledged that the characters in Star Wars are more “tributes” than original creations.

2. The Hidden Fortress (1958)

The next place Lucas looked for inspiration was to this period epic by Akira Kurosawa, which buttresses the whole plot. It relates the story of a general and a princess behind enemy lines in feudal Japan, fighting their way to safely with the help of two bumbling peasants. The blueprint these two provided for C-3PO and R2-D2, and their function as comic relief, sticks out more than anything, but there’s also a villainous general, Hyoe Tadokoro, with proto-Darth facial scars.

This wasn’t the only Kurosawa film that fed into Lucas’s imagination. The brawl in the Cantina is straight from Yojimbo (1961), and the hiding-under-the-floor trick is a lift from its sequel, Sanjuro (1962). Striking amounts of plot and imagery in The Empire Strikes Back come from Derzu Uzala (1975), with its wanderings through the Siberian wilderness.

3. The Searchers (1956)

The quest to find Debbie Edwards, abducted as a child by Comanches, obsesses her uncle Ethan (John Wayne) to the point where his moral compass spins off. With this premise, John Ford’s legendary western served as a major inspiration for just about the whole movie brat generation, especially Paul Schrader, in his screenplays for The Yakuza (1974), Taxi Driver (1976) and Hardcore (1979), but also John Milius (1975’s The Wind and the Lion).

John Wayne in The SearchersCredit:
Rex Features/Everett Collection

What of Star Wars? The homestead in the desert, which gets burned down; the naïve farm boy who becomes a hero; and the strict father figure who becomes a brutal avenger – Anakin, Darth and Obi-Wan combined – show that Ford’s saga left just as much of a mark on Lucas, too.

4. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Now to those light-saber duels. Errol Flynn’s charming scoundrel may be closer in character to Han Solo than Luke Skywalker, but his acrobatic swordplay – especially the famous fight with Basil Rathbone – became a crucial touchstone for the latter’s saber choreography. Not only this, but we find Olivia de Havilland as Maid Marian, sporting that imperious hauteur and even Princess Leia’s hairdo long before they were fashionable. Plus, the composer of this matinee favourite was one Erich Wolfgang Korngold, from whom John Williams derived a brassy, fanfare-rich approach to orchestration and even a theme or two – Korngold’s score for King’s Row (1942) was used as a temp track while Lucas was cutting Star Wars together.

Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin HoodCredit:
Rex Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

5. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

No one coloured Lucas’s visual approach to landscape more than David Lean. Characters dwarfed in long-lens shots by the immensity of desert: check. There are thematic parallels too, in the desperate freedom fight being undertaken by men of honour, while rascally politicians meddle behind the scenes. Flash forward to Attack of the Clones, and Lucas really lays bare his working: not only did he shoot a dialogue scene between Padme, Anakin and R2-D2 at the Plaza de España in Seville, which Lean used for the pre-intermission scene in Lawrence, but the walk-and-talk is a direct homage to Lean’s composition, which had Claude Rains, Jack Hawkins and Anthony Quayle striding towards the moving camera.

6. Casablanca (1942)

The Mos Eisley spaceport sequence 45 minutes into Star Wars is pure Casablanca. Rick’s Café becomes the Cantina, shady under-the-table deals are the order of the day, you’ve got your swing orchestra and barflies smoking pipes. Han Solo may not literally own the dive, but Humphrey Bogart’s all-encompassing cynicism is probably the single most important model for Harrison Ford’s performance, right down to his fondness for the word “kid”.

Han demands 15,000 credits when Luke and Obi-Wan arrive at their safe port; boat passage out of Casablanca, oddly enough, costs 15,000 francs. Though Jabba the Hutt was excised from the original theatrical version of this sequence, the character is a homage to Sidney Greenstreet’s cunning and portly nightclub owner, Signor Ferrari – original artwork for Jabba even had him wearing a fez.

7. Metropolis (1927)

Forbidden Planet (1956). 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Silent Running (1972). All the key works of science fiction cinema feed into Star Wars in some way or another – Lucas’s films are nothing if not an enthusiastic rummage through all the iconography of populist futurism. The earliest key influence is probably Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, not just for the overt resemblance between the robot double of Maria (Brigitte Helm) and the notably feminine, if not literally female, C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), but for plenty of other design and story elements.

Metropolis 1927Credit:
Rex Features/Everett

For instance, the black-gloved prosthetic hand of Rotwang, via the mechanical hand with a life of its own in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), becomes the motif of Darth Vader’s cybernetic right hand, suggesting a soul divided against itself – a legacy passed from father to son when he chops Luke’s hand off, and back from son to father when Luke does the same thing in Return of the Jedi.

8. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

It’s less a game of spotting the influence than spotting the uncanny parallels between American myths. The Jawas are the Munchkins. C3PO is the Tin Man. Chewbacca is (OK, a variation on) the Cowardly Lion. Han, in all honesty, isn’t much like the Scarecrow. Toto, though, is not unlike R2-D2, even in name. Luke is a simple farmer, living with his aunt and uncle, who must leave his home (Tattoine = Kansas) after a cataclysm. The ruby slippers are The Force.

There are uncanny parallels between Star Wars and the Wizard of OzCredit:
Everett Collection / Rex Feature

There are bottomless chasms, and holographic addresses, and guardians of the gate. Dorothy’s mother-figures are threefold (two evil witches, one good), just as Luke’s father figures are threefold (Ben, Darth, and his imagined real father). Obi-Wan and the Wicked Witch of the West are even strangely allied by leaving empty robes behind when despatched. It’s a fun game.

9. The Dam Busters (1955)

War pictures from Wings (1927) onwards assisted Lucas’s vision – he actually interspliced dogfight sequences from that film as placeholders while assembling his rough cut. Others include The Guns of Navarone (1961), for the climactic attack on the Death Star, along with the fighter-bomber action film 633 Squadron (1964). But the most significant of these is The Dam Busters, thanks to the very specific bombing strategy Luke and his fellow X-wing pilots must deploy, each taking turns to try and deliver their killer payload. There are snippets of dialogue Lucas reused verbatim – “Get set for your attack run!”; “Look at the size of that thing!”. Listen very, very closely and you can even hear Obi-Wan say “You’ll bring the Ruhr steel industry to a standstill!” (Not really.)

10. Triumph of the Will (1935)

And so to the awarding of the medals, a scene of great ceremonial pomp which Lucas was brazen enough to crib, in its layout and shot choices, from the most famous Nazi propaganda film ever made. Luke, Han and Chewbacca walk through the massed hordes of Rebel Alliance extras like Moses parting the Red Sea, or like Hitler, Himmler and Viktor Lutze laying a wreath at the memorial for President Hindenburg, in Triumph of the Will’s equivalent sequence.

A Still from Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will

Doffing the cap to Leni Riefenstahl was an interesting and counter-intuitive choice for this climax, given that the Nazi associations elsewhere (Stormtroopers and such) are so clearly on the Empire’s side – the closest thing to a Hitler in Lucas’s universe is Palpatine. Ending on this contradictory chord – simultaneously heroic and troubling, once you know its origins – brought Lucas’s vision back full circle to what some would call the fascist undercurrents in Joseph Campbell, and might be the most serious gesture in the whole film: perhaps a reminder of how easily totalitarianism can knock at any society’s door.